Caveat emptor

4

Upstairs, everything was going very well.

He was not sure whether this was true, or whether Tilla was just saying so to keep her patient calm.

The air held the spearmint smell of the pennyroyal Tilla had taken from Valens’s medicine shelves. The woman was kneeling on the floor with her back to him, elbows resting on the bed and head bowed in concentration. A thick tail of tangled red hair cascaded down over a cream linen shift that Ruso thought he might have seen before on his wife. A selection of cloths and woolen bandages and sponges had been laid out next to the bowls of water on top of the cupboard. A little figurine of a goddess had been placed on a stool in the corner. In front of it was a lit candle and an offering of some of the olives they had brought from Gaul. Tilla might have started worshipping Christos while they were away, but here she was taking no chances.

He beckoned her out of the room to explain what he wanted, adding, “Don’t tell her I’m a doctor.”

His wife looked askance at him. “Do not think of behaving like one. It is bad enough managing with no birthing stool and no helpers.”

“If you need us to-”

“If I am truly desperate, I will ask you to fetch a neighbor.”

Back in the room, the woman was eager to tell him her troubles. The torrent of words tumbled over one another and at times he had difficulty separating them even though her Latin was good. It seemed that her husband and his brother had left Verulamium three days ago, intending to visit a neighbor on the Londinium road. They had not been seen since. Now the Council were accusing them of theft.

“You must listen!” she insisted, gripping a fistful of bedcover. “Something has happened to them. Nobody will listen to me. That is why I came to the procurator.”

She stopped talking, lumbered to her feet, and walked around to the window. Clinging onto the sill, she bent forward and cried out. Tilla stood behind her, patiently massaging her back and assuring her she was doing very well.

He waited for the contraction to pass, silently absorbing this fresh evidence that women were very poorly designed. He had, without telling his wife, added a book on pregnancy and childbirth to his collection of medical texts. Yet it still remained a mystery to him why Tilla, who knew more about childbirth than most, was so desperate to go through it. Picturing himself carrying a small son or even a daughter on his shoulders gave him an inexplicable sense of warmth and contentment, but had his own part in the procedure been as troublesome-not to mention dangerous-as this, he might have wondered whether it was worth the bother.

Finally Camma let go of the windowsill and whispered, “Another step closer?”

“Another step closer,” Tilla assured her. “Do not worry. My husband will help to look for your man. He is good at this sort of thing.”

As the woman began to describe the missing brothers, he could see his wife counting the time to the next contraction on her fingers.

Julius Asper was a tall man with kind eyes. He was thirty-four years old. His hair was short and brown, with some gray at the temples, and he had no beard. To Ruso’s relief he also had a scar under his right eye, which might distinguish him from hundreds of other brown-haired tallish men of the same age. As for the kind eyes-that would perhaps depend on whether one was a devoted wife or a defaulting taxpayer. The brother was shorter, with darker hair in the same style and-oh, joy! — part of an ear missing. Now that was a useful description. Both spoke good Latin. She had never noticed an accent, but since she had one herself, that might not mean much.

“Please find him!” She clutched at the sill again. “Everyone is lying to me. Aargh! Oh blessed Andraste, make it stop!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Why did I let him do this to me?”

Ruso left the room quietly, unnoticed and doubtlessly unmissed.

Downstairs, Ruso conceded that he would be going to Verulamium. “Serena won’t mind if Tilla stays here, will she?”

Valens’s hesitant “Uh” hinted at complications.

They had never discussed it, but Ruso was aware that despite their own friendship, the two women had never been close. Serena was the daughter of a high-ranking Roman centurion. Tilla was not only a native, but, when they had first met, she had been Ruso and Valens’s housekeeper. It was a social distance that neither woman had really managed to bridge. Still, it was surely not so serious that Valens would turn down a request for hospitality. He said, “I don’t think an investigator is supposed to have his wife trailing along all over the place.”

“Oh, absolutely. But if Serena comes home tomorrow and finds somebody else’s wife here with just me, the apprentices, and the kitchen boy, it’ll look a bit odd.”

“You mean she’s not back tonight?”

“Anything’s possible,” said Valens, whose earlier statement that his wife had gone to visit a relative had, now Ruso thought about it, been unusually vague.

Ruso looked more closely at the room in which they were sitting. It was true that the walls were elegantly painted and there were no beer stains, but there were balls of dust in the corners. He saw for the first time that someone had dribbled oil down the lamp stand and not wiped up the pool on the floor, and recalled the dying flowers on the table in the hall.

“So where-”

“She’s bound to be back any day now,” Valens assured him. “She left most of her shoes behind.”

Ruso decided not to pry. He would leave that to Tilla. Instead he tried, “How are the twins?”

Valens brightened. “Oh, fine little chaps. Coming along very nicely. New teeth and new words practically every time I see them. Sorry about the state of the place, but she’s got most of the staff with her. Still, I was thinking we could crack open that amphora tonight and perhaps Tilla might, uh…”

“You want Tilla to cook?”

Their eyes met. For a moment neither of them spoke, each perhaps recalling his own selection of Tilla’s culinary disasters.

Valens said, “Of course we could always…”

“We’ll have something brought in,” agreed Ruso, anticipating the end of the sentence.